Food, Drink Found In Midas' Tomb

December 26, 1999|By GUY GUGLIOTTA The Washington Post

He was said to have a "golden touch," and King Midas' subjects spared no expense when he died, entombing him inside an opulent wooden bedroom filled with inlaid furniture and submerged beneath a 174-foot mound of impermeable clay, gravel and logs.

To keep him company -- or give him sustenance -- in the great beyond, they brought in the leftovers from his funeral banquet -- a savory stew and a fermented brew of wine, barley beer and honey mead.

This all occurred about 700 B.C. in ancient Gordion, in what is now central Turkey; and while the Midas legend has endured, scientists have only recently focused on the mundane details of his funeral.

Reporting in Thursday's issue of the scientific journal Nature, a research team led by University of Pennsylvania archaeochemist Patrick E. McGovern identified the cocktail that was consumed and found that the Midas mourners dined on barbecued lamb or goat accompanied by lentils in a sauce.

"One spice was either anise or fennel," McGovern said. "There were a lot of others, but we're not sure what they were." And the uniform size and texture of the 16 tested food samples suggested that the barbecue may have been recooked with the lentils in a stew, McGovern added. There were no bones in the main course.

McGovern's team extracted food and beverage residues from pottery jars and bronze cauldrons, bowls and ladles found in the burial chamber, analyzed them with mass spectrometry and chromatographic techniques, and compared the results to reference samples.

While the food might be described as typical Mediterranean fare, McGovern noted that the cocktail echoed the beverages of northern Europe, Greece and the Balkans, an indication that Midas and his Phrygian Empire may have had European origins.

"Europeans used apples, cranberries or anything they could find," McGovern said. The mix also suggested the grog consumed by the ancient Greeks in the Homeric epics. McGovern, an expert at dating ancient foods, is the discoverer of the world's oldest known wine (a 7,400-year-old Persian retsina).

According to Greek mythology, Midas was a wealthy monarch made wealthier by the god Dionysus, who gave him the ability to turn anything he touched into gold. This worked fine until dinner, when Midas discovered he couldn't eat gold meals. He consulted with Dionysus again, then washed away his powers in the river Pactolus.

Midas today is generally believed to be the Phrygian King Mita, identified by contemporary Assyrians as an important potentate ruling large swatches of what is now modern Turkey. The enormous mound at Gordion, southwest of modern Ankara, is the largest ancient structure in the region.